Category Archives: fun

I think it’s time for another poem from my book Songs of Love and Grammar. This is one of a small set that have nothing to do with romantic difficulty – though it does have to do with getting around.

When you’re referring to a couple of geographical features, such as the Bow River and the Elbow River, you can join them together and say the Bow and Elbow rivers, because river can be treated as a descriptive term in this case. If you’re talking about Green Bay and North Bay, you can say Green and North bays if you’re talking about the bays, but it might be misleading to use that when you’re talking about the cities. Some people like to extend this practice to city names, as in Forts Meyers and St. John, but that can get a little dodgy. Or maybe more than a little…

Getting around efficiently

Oh, all the places we have gone –
we’ve seen Forts Myers and St. John;
Green and Thunder Bays were nice,
and Frobisher, though full of ice;
Long and Virginia Beaches – spiffy;
Grand and Cedar Rapids – iffy;
I still recall how we did things
in Hot and Colorado Springs
and Sans Diego and Jose –
oh, yes, and don’t forget ta Fe;
Saints Petersburg and Paul were green,
Dart and Fal mouths were marine;
Ott and Osh awas were cool;
Grands Forks and Rapids, rather cruel;
Cals gary and ifornia, great;
Monts pelier and réal – don’t wait;
Wins dsor and nipeg, give a miss;
Den and Vancou vers, skiers’ bliss;
Columbs us and ia, just fair;
Phoeni and Bron xes – don’t go there;
Moose Jaw and Factory – no way;
Jun and Gatin eaux – OK;
Toes peka, ledo, ronto – yeah;
Men chester and itoba – nah.
Oh, yes, we’ve had the time that was
in Canad and Americ as!

I think it’s about time I posted another poem from Songs of Love and Grammar, the silly book of rhymes about grammar and romantic difficulties which I wrote a few years ago. This one focuses on the “restrictive which.”

Allow me to explain. Let’s say you have a noun that’s modified by a subordinate clause: “the cake that I ate” or “the cake, which I ate.” If there are several cakes, you specify which cake you’re talking about by using a restrictive clause: “the cake that I ate” (not a different cake that I didn’t eat). If there’s only one cake you could be talking about, and you just want to give a bit more information about it, you can do so with a nonrestrictive clause: “the cake, which I ate.”

It’s more common in North America to use that rather than which for restrictive clauses (the cake that I ate rather than the cake which I ate), but which is normal in England and elsewhere and many people use it in North America. The thing that really makes the difference between the two kinds of clause (in print) is the comma: with a comma (the cake, which I ate), it’s nonrestrictive; without (the cake which I ate), it’s restrictive. This poem is for those people who think the restrictive which doesn’t exist. Oh, yes, it does…

The restrictive witch

There is a certain house which sits upon a shady street
and in it lives a person which you may not want to meet.

She has a cloak and hat which she is never seen without
and owns a darkling cat which likes to yowl and prowl about.

And there is one key thing which makes this witch a cause of fear:
she has a special magic which she does to those who near.

Whatever thing she catches which is single of its kind,
she makes it simply that which is like others you may find.

This is an operation which she does with neat precision
by writing sentences which are subjected to excision

of one small curly mark which serves to separate the noun
from modifying phrase which newly serves to tie it down.

No longer have you just one job, which pays you well, to work;
your job which pays you well shares time with other jobs which shirk.

You had a dent, which is not big, alone upon your car;
now by the dent which is not big sit other dents that are.

Your marriage, which is happy, soon will find it’s not alone –
your marriage which is happy won’t be when the rest are known.

Your ring, which says Eileen, will lead Eileen to know your games:
your ring which says Eileen shares space with rings with other names.

It’s bad enough to have one bad divorce, which is near done;
the bad divorce which is near done awaits another one,

and though one lawyer’s bill, which could be worse, is not a lot,
the bill which could be worse is stacked with others which could not.

And all this loss which is not fair comes not from peeve or itch;
it comes from lack of caution with that bad restrictive witch.

This is a fiction I wrote several years ago for a book idea that I didn’t finish. I just remembered it. Here, read it.

One of the people who had a profound influence on my early development as a word taster was my grade two teacher, Miss Knirps. It was not quite that she had a word taster’s love for language and for the flavours of words. Oh, she loved certain words and ways of saying things, but she always seemed to approach words as though they were bees, useful for honey but capable of stinging you at any moment.

Miss Knirps of course seemed impossibly old, but I believe she was about 27 at the time. She was prim and pretty in a very tidy way. She was also very concerned with decorum. She wanted, I think, for all the children of the world to spontaneously join in a circle to sing decent songs about pleasant things. She was a naïve romantic at heart, her world view evidently shaped by too many Barbara Cartland novels. But she must have had a darker, funkier side to her, kept very far apart from her classroom life, because the songs she would recite to us, or have us recite, or even sometimes sing, were lively, popular songs from the current hit parade… bowdlerized. Songs from groups like The Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan.

I remember her sitting and reading to us in that exaggerated intonation and sing-songy voice that teachers of small children can have: “Old black water, keep on rolling. Mississippi moon, won’t you keep on shining on me? Keep on shining your light; you’re going to make everything all right. And I don’t have any worries, for I am not in a hurry at all. I would like to hear some happy Dixieland; pretty lady, please take me by the hand.” She looked at us with a very proper smile of the sort intended for those of tiny brain. “And the lady would take him by the hand and say, ‘I shall dance with you, good sir, all day long.’”

Miss Knirps folded the piece of foolscap she had written her lyrics on. One of the girls – Shelly Priest, in whom one could see the spark of a Knirps-in-training – raised her hand and said, “And then what would they do?”

Miss Knirps got a dreamy look in her eye. “They would have to part ways, of course, as the sun came close to the evening. But he would give her his calling card, and he would say –” she produced another sheet of foolscap and unfolded it carefully like a blintz or a diaper – “Missy, don’t lose my name; you don’t want to dance with anyone else. Send it off in a letter to yourself! Missy, don’t lose my name, for it is the one you will own. You will use it when we are together and have a home.” (We didn’t know at the time that Miss Knirps – Melissa Knirps – was called “Missy” by many of her friends.)

Then she taught us that chorus to a rather stiffly simplified version of the music – the refrain from Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” of course. I have to say that, stripped of its louche jazzy tone, that tune is as stiff as an old dry washcloth. But we didn’t know any better. We sang it together.

We sang it a few times through, in fact, so that some of us could actually remember it when we got home. Joey McTavish was singing it around his house when his teenage sister Janis heard him, did a spit take with her Coke, and fell about the place in a paroxysm of laughter for more than ten solid minutes. Then she pulled out Pretzel Logic and played it for Joey.

Joey’s eyes, so I’m told, were the size of dinner plates by the end of the song. Naturally, she played it again, and sang along. And for good measure she played him a the rest of the record too. And when she asked him if Miss Knirps had taught them anything else, Joey’s muddled recollections ultimately allowed her to sort out enough to pull out the Doobie Brothers and play “Black Water.”

When show and tell came the next day, Joey had a look on his face like he had a unicorn with side-mounted machine guns in his bag. When his turn came, he toodled over to the record player, which was already out and in position from some Burl Ives songs Miss Knirps had played for us. As he pulled out his record, Miss Knirps naturally went over to help him.

As she reached for the record, which was not in the album cover, she spotted the label on it and froze for approximately one half second. Then, with her smile held with the firmness of rigor mortis, she took it from him, placed it on the player, and played “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.” Which, in case you don’t know, has no words and is a Duke Ellington tune of the sort children would enjoy and teachers would not object to. Even if it is being played by Steely Dan.

“But that’s not –” Joey started to say.

Miss Knirps pressed one finger on her lips and another, firmly, on his. “Let’s listen.”

The tune done, she handed the record back to Joey and said, “You must thank your sister for lending us her record.” He hadn’t mentioned that it was hers. Apparently this was an easy guess. “But tell her to be careful and make sure it doesn’t get damaged. I think it could get scratched if you keep bringing it here.” And, smiling ever so sweetly, she sent him back to his seat, his face now looking like someone else had just eaten his ice cream. We couldn’t figure out why.

But of course we found out later, after school, and several of us got Janis to play it for us until she heard her mother coming home.

As for Miss Knirps, she switched genres, preferring to base her verse on literature that no one’s teenage sister was likely to be reading. She read us “The Highwayman” largely unaltered, quite a thing to do for grade two kids in 1974. She also read us something that to this day I haven’t traced for certain but strongly suspect was based on Charles Bukowski; I remember her saying “We danced and danced and danced and danced. And danced.” Heh. Danced indeed.

In retrospect, I do believe that Miss Knirps would have been more disturbed to hear us singing the nonstandard negatives (“you don’t wanna call nobody else”; “and I ain’t got no worries”) than to hear us singing about adult romantic entanglements. Such poor language was not for good children! I know for certain that it was those, and not the entanglements – more adumbrated than explicit, and opaque to us at that age anyway – that really blew away Joey. And the rest of us, too. Hearing them in those songs was the linguistic equivalent of seeing Miss Knirps taking a pee.

In my tasting of cartoon, I mentioned that I had other cartoons that I wanted to dig up.

Well, I dug up the one I most wanted to dig up.

It’s not really all that great. Especially the artwork, if you can even call it that. But I find it amusing. It’s an embellished version of an origin-of-theatre story one of my theatre production professors used in a lecture. (He was a great dude; owned a propeller beanie and introduced us to the acronym WAFWOT*.)

It has a couple of swearwords in it. I’m telling you that just in case you prefer to avoid seeing swearwords. (I have nothing against people who don’t like swearwords. They’re the people who maintain the potency of taboo language.)

In one episode of Big Bang Theory, Amy and Sheldon are playing a game they call “Counterfactuals” (let’s leave aside the linguistic use of that term, which is a little different). They challenge Leonard with this question: “In a world where mankind is ruled by a giant intelligent beaver, what food is no longer consumed?”

He guesses wrong, of course, because that’s how the show works. The correct answer, according to Sheldon and Amy, is cheese Danish. The explanation: “In a world ruled by a giant beaver, mankind builds many dams to please the beaver overlord. The low-lying city of Copenhagen is flooded. Thousands die. Devastated, the Danes never invent their namesake pastry. How does one miss that?”

So anyway, that never sat quite right with me, and I was thinking about it today while I was face down on a massage table. First of all, it didn’t sit quite right because Denmark isn’t all that low-lying overall, certainly not as much as the Netherlands (hence the name: nether lands). Of course, Copenhagen is at sea level, but so are many other cities, some of which may likewise be associated with particular foods. I think Dutch pancakes and other Dutch foods would be at least as endangered. Except, of course, the Dutch would build dams to keep the water out of Amsterdam. As in fact they have.

Which leads me to the key point. Dams would not make the sea level rise. I mean, yeah, if they put dams around more low-lying land to reclaim more of it from the ocean, that might have a modest effect, but you know that’s not why or where beavers build dams. Beavers build dams on rivers. To make big ponds. Lakes, even. Reservoirs. Just like people do. Only presumably more dams would be built than we have already.

And all those dams would keep water from getting to the oceans. So, if anything, the sea level would be a bit lower. Not a whole lot, probably, but maybe a bit.

But meanwhile, big cities on rivers would be flooded. Sorta like what has happened to some cities in China where they’ve built dams. Whole cities have been submerged, their residents relocated.

So name a big city on a river that would be submerged, a big city associated with a famous pastry.

I’m going with Vienna. It’s on the Danube. I think it would be likely to be underwater. Vienna is associated with croissants. (The story of their being invented in honour of bakers hearing moorish armies tunnelling under the walls has no historical basis – and in fact croissants aren’t as old as that – but still, Vienna. Croissants. Anyway, Paris would also be underwater, don’t you think? Damming the Seine? I think so.) So you probably wouldn’t be able to get croissants. Maybe several other things invented in Vienna and Paris and other river cities too.

But you’d be OK. You could have a Danish instead.

Yes, yes, I know, it’s a TV show. Remember, I was lying face down on a massage table. You’re supposed to relax, so I wasn’t going to lie there planning my day or week. I needed to think of completely irrelevant things.

Is my point that the writers of Big Bang Theory aren’t geniuses? Oh, no, they’re geniuses. (Or genii if you prefer.) But geniuses at being funny. They pulled it off. And they kept me thinking about their show after.

I’m not even going to go into other things, such as how Sheldon, Leonard, et al. would surely recite the rhyme of the One Ring not in English, as they did in one episode, but in the Dark Tongue of Mordor (as I did at the TV in response). Again: What, were they going to translate it for their audience? If the show were written at true full-on geek level the audience would be much smaller. See? They know what they’re doing.

To say or spell indict –
or, even worse, indictment –
could lead to much excictment
but not so much insict…
If spelling’s your delict,
you know that dereliction
could lead to interdiction
if you don’t keep it tict.
If out loud you indite,
pay close heed to the diction
lest you pronounce a fiction
due to an eye-tongue fict.
But if you will recict
and wrict as indicated,
you will be vindicated –
not derelict but delict.
Pay heed to my invict
and you’ll be an invictus,
your face a grinning rictus
because you did it rict.

Ah, isn’t English spelling a treasure? Sure, like a treasure-hunt in a sandbox – one that’s in current use as a kitty litter box.

But actually the offending nuggets are not so fresh. Most of the worst booby-traps in English orthography came about during and after the English Renaissance (i.e., the time of Shakespeare and thereafter), when various scholars felt that English words that were descended from Latin ought to wear their fine ancestry on their sleeves. (See “What’s up with English spelling?”) The idea that spelling should simply reflect sound was too plebeian; orthography offers such a panoply of finery, why not come out in full dress, unburdened by quotidian chores? 太好了! 你學吧!

So we had a word endyte or endite coming from Old French enditer, which in turn came from Latin in plus dictare ‘say, declare’, and the scholarly pedants of the time felt that it should therefore claim its nobility and sit on the page as indict. The same fellows gave us the o in people (because of Latin populum) and the b in debt (because of Latin debitum).

I do not think we owe a det of gratitude to these peple. I would rather see them indicted.

But not indited. You see, the unaltered spelling indite also persisted, with a slightly different sense: ‘dictate; enjoin; compose; put in words; recite’. It’s a word of literature now, and a rather high-toned precious one. Meanwhile, indict is a word known to the basest members of society. Oh, the irony.

Thanks to Iva Cheung for reminding me that I wanted to taste this one.

The title of this exhibition of new works, “After Colville,” refers both to the fact that the photos were taken by the artist immediately after viewing an exhibition of works by Alex Colville and to the evident influence of Colville on the works themselves: in their mood and composition, they may be seen as a sort of homage to Colville’s work – “After Alex Colville,” as a museum placard would say. The title is also a reference to Tom Stoppard’s play After Magritte, an absurd and comical piece of theatre that avails itself of the same ambiguity. The artist himself performed in a production of the Stoppard play when he was a university student. The photographs and their commentary are also intended to raise questions of the interface between viewer and art and of the very place of art in modern life and the role of the gallery as an institution in an era when artistic production is a widespread recreational activity and the technology of small portable cameras supplants for many the essential quiddity of the carefully crafted artistic object, and they also form a critique of the verbal framing of art by placards in galleries.

IMG_1993_aPhotographThis first image presents us with a simple yet timeless ritual: the consumption of a small cup of perfect coffee in an artistic surrounding. The artist chose to represent the stimulation of viewing Colville’s art through the consumption of a stimulating chemical, caffeine. This image brings to mind previous similar photographs he took on earlier visits, with other cups and tables. The composition deliberately echoes the tight geometry of Colville’s careful paintings. The human figure that dominates each of Colville’s paintings is nearly absent here, however, represented only by one barely visible shoe (the artist’s own). The artist presents himself simply as a foot walking through the gallery, and an eye (that of the camera, echoed by the coffee cup). We are challenged by the erasure of the true human element: Colville’s paintings are of and by a human, but this photograph is from an era of electronics and objects when our very humanity is always already in erasure through overexposure via its hyperreal hyper-representation in “selfies.”

This photograph, like all the images in this exhibit, is named with a modified version of the image file name. The name format is a standard one and suggests to the viewer that the photograph was taken with an iPhone, that ubiquitous chronicler of modern anomie and narcissism. The artist, in this choice of medium, parallels the flaw in the edge of the table, suggesting a crack in the pristine surface of modern aesthetic life and the ultimate disposability of our images and experiences, just as the table itself is sure to end up in a landfill and probably sooner than later. The added “a” on each image name is a personalization and may stand for “altered” or “after” or perhaps, as with highway names (such as the Highway 1A that ran through the artist’s youth), “alternate.” The artist notes disingenuously that “I took the photos with an iPhone because it’s what I had with me,” reminding us that the logic of aesthetic preference is, like the coffee cup, inevitably circular.

IMG_1999_a
Photograph
This photograph was taken through a window in the “tower” section of the Art Gallery of Ontario, on the fourth floor, where modern art is exhibited. The artist notes, “In the past half year the art exhibits up there haven’t changed any more than the view has.” The image presents the viewer with a juxtaposition of curves and straight lines, old and new; the angle of the window reminds us of perspective, which is not only a key element in representational art and mathematically important in Colville’s work but is also essential to the art viewing experience itself in that every viewer brings his or her own perspective. Colville’s work often presents an interface or conflict between the traditional and modern, and is tightly composed and cut off at the edges. This image would never feature in a Colville work, however; it is much too busy and it lacks a human presence. We see windows here, which present openings, but there are no people visible; the artist engages us with the perennial modern question: “Where is everybody?”

IMG_2002_a
PhotographThe tilting and slight curvature of straight lines in this image make the viewer feel disoriented and slightly queasy. The artist has not corrected the barrel distortion present in the very-wide-angle iPhone images, and the slight tilt suggests haste, unsureness, or carelessness. The two figures in this photograph are presented only as legs, again as though the role of the viewer in an art gallery is only an ambulatory one: the seeing and thinking part of the person is erased, eclipsed. This is reinforced by the sign on the wall, “Walker Court.” The swath of wood across the front is the top of the containing wall of a curving staircase on which the artist was standing while he took this picture. The viewer is invited to consider the possibility of climbing over it and falling to the unseen floor below: the ultimate death for art. And yet the two unidentified artworks perceptible in this image look on as dispassionately as the sun and the moon.

IMG_2003_a
PhotographThis photograph presents an encounter, but we do not know its nature. Is it a chance passing, a conversation, a confrontation? Arrangements of two figures are common in Colville’s work, sometimes with the face of one of them not visible, leaving us to follow the unseen gaze and reflect on questions of mortality and morbidity.

IMG_2006_aPhotographIn this photograph, we are both charmed and saddened by the mother-and-child pair. The child clings to the glass, for protection or with the aim of escape; meanwhile, the face of the mother is partially obliterated by her gesturing hand, pointing to questions of the effacement of the human person of a parent by the role of instructor. We cannot see what she is gesturing to, so we are invited to bring ourselves into the picture and view from her angle. The pink-jacketed person from IMG_2002_a is present again in this image; she may be museum staff, but she is looking away. In the doorway below the pair, we dimly glimpse a male body entering the frame: he is headless as of yet, a disembodied pair of legs representing the oncoming masculine dominance of the spectator-as-headless-ambulator to override the thoughtful feminine role. The daughter will soon have her eyes obliterated as the mother’s are, and ultimately will become a decapitated denizen of the institution of art as the pink-jacketed person is. This photograph was taken from the same position as IMG_2002_a, so we know, given the fixed focal length of an iPhone lens, that it has been cropped. The cropping of the top of the arch recalls the cropping-off of architectural elements in Colville’s work and the decapitation of the institutional bodies in this picture.

IMG_2007_aPhotograph
This image is one of only two horizontal images in this exhibit. Horizontal images, once the default for photographs, have become the exception in images taken by mobile phones due to the standard orientation in which one holds them and the tendency to use them to take pictures of people. The sensuous curves in this image belong to the same staircase as is hinted in IMG_2002_a, a staircase designed by Frank Gehry for the museum’s expansion several years earlier. The photograph thus becomes an appropriate of the architect’s work into the photographer’s oeuvre, reminding us that architecture is not considered by many to be a fine art and inviting us to take part in its “legitimization” through re-presentation. At first, this image appears to be devoid of human figures, but the dark dome in the lower left quadrant, in front of the railing, on closer inspection is revealed as someone’s head. In this way we are shown how enveloping and containing the high walls of the staircase are, a preventative against hurling oneself over and into the void, but at the same time the person is headed towards a void: the forbidding dark archway on the right. The eyes are again invisible, calling into question the legitimacy of the act of viewing and also telling us that the person could not see that he or she was being photographed. The artist notes that “unlike a regular camera, an iPhone has the bonus of being silent when it takes a picture, so it’s possible to be entirely surreptitious and not disturb people or alert them to the fact that they are being photographed, which could affect their behaviour.” In this way he again implicates us in the scopophilia of the gallery, where humans become stalkers of the aesthetic image and of each other.

IMG_2010_aPhotographThis image swirls with curves interplaying with straight lines in perspective. Some of the curves are from the arches in the old architecture of the building, and some are from the newer curving staircase, which is the staircase on which the artist was standing when taking pictures IMIG_2002_a through IMG_2007_a. The careful and cropped composition echoes the compositions of Colville’s paintings. In a Colville painting, however, we might see a figure in the foreground, and perhaps a gun on the wooden surface; here, we see only a distant figure carefully placed on the left side of an archway, looking upward as he walks. On the right side, a sign is cut off at the letter P. Is this for Presence, or Perspective, or Photography? Or is it the beginning of the word Please, as in (perhaps) “Please do not place handguns on the ledge”?

IMG_2016_aPhotograph
This image presents more cropped curves, a consistent theme in this exhibition. It is much more human than the others, however: it shows three women in full figure, one gesturing forward, one holding her hands to her eyes, the third just entering the frame. The cropped-off foot of the bottom figure repeats the theme of cropping present throughout this exhibit, and may be a repudiation of, or answer to, the disembodied foot seen in the first photograph of the exhibit. It is answered by the bust in the centre of the photograph (a bust of a pope, identified in recent years as a Bernini and consequently moved to a place of pride), which has very the top of its head cut off by the door frame. The triangular composition of the three women is reminiscent of the careful geometry of figures in Colville’s paintings. The artist invites us to join these women to enter and explore the gallery – but is the incipient decapitation of an old paternal religious figure a portent of what will become of them?

IMG_2018_aPhotograph
This photograph was taken in the Art Gallery of Ontario shop. It prominently features kitchenware and other housewares, which may seem out of place in the store of an art establishment; it asks us to consider whether there is a true dividing line between the aesthetics of houseware design and that of paintings and sculptures, two realms that may be joined in the middle by the ostentatiously aesthetic yet functional architecture of the Art Gallery of Ontario edifice itself as seen in the previous pictures. The colours have had their saturation enhanced, as though the world of functional objects is more vivid than the etiolated and withering sphere of the pure aesthetic object. The image features a strong single figure, as in many Colville paintings; he is facing away from the camera and apparently unaware of his role in the aesthetic production, simply a faceless mute personage, deafened to the world by his headphones, who might as easily have wandered into a housewares department and looked up to find himself in an art gallery, wondering what the difference was. The human figure partially conceals a mannequin bust, which brings to mind the first painting that Colville felt was truly successful, showing his wife looking out an attic window while a mannequin bust dominates the foreground. The glow at the top of the picture invites us to the heaven of consumerism while at the same time reminding us that we are in the world of the real and dirty – we may assume it is present due to smudging on the lens of the phone, which is heavily handled.

IMG_2032_aPhotographIn the last image of the exhibit, we find ourselves entirely away from the gallery and into the real world that the art supposedly represents. This is St. Patrick station on the Toronto subway, the closest station to the Art Gallery of Ontario. The photo of an oncoming subway train taken from the platform is one of the great clichés of Toronto urban photography, but at the same time it too recalls Colville: the obvious and perfect perspective, the pensive figure in the foreground, a hint perhaps of the horse and train from Colville’s most famous painting (which appears in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining). We are unsettled by the anomie and the faint suggestion of suicide. At the same time, there are people in the background, a normalizing presence reminding us that a person walking around with a cell phone cannot always control all elements of the composition; as pure as it might have been not have had them there, the photographer could not exactly shoo them away, and he did not wish to digitally alter the photographs – other than adjusting the colours and levels, which leaves us to ask ourselves whether those privileged silent alterations are less altering than the erasure of other details.

An overall note about the exhibition

The presentation of the text in the captions for the artworks contains many sections in strikethrough, a style that preserves legibility while at the same time signifying deletion. This presentation imbues the work with a chill of censorship and a suggestion of the evanescence of the written word, and it begs questions not only of the “legibility” of artworks themselves but of the erasure of the critical voice, the disappearance of the reflective approach to artwork in a time when so much is dictated from “above” and the the curator’s presence is not only obsolescent but in fact always already self-erasing at the moment of utterance through the perpetual requestioning of thought. It can also be seen as an expression of the artist’s view that “there is a lot of onanistic bullshit written on gallery placards that doesn’t enhance the understanding or appreciation of the artwork for anyone other than the people who write it, and possibly not them either. Interpretation of artwork is an enjoyable sport, but it’s a game that each viewer should get to play for him or herself over and over. Some placards are like fully-played gameboards lacquered into place: the critic has had his fun and you don’t get to. I’d prefer to know details of the context and material and the work’s place in the artist’s oeuvre, things that help me understand it better, and maybe get a few thoughts on the content presented as simple suggestions, and not be told what I’m looking at or how I’m reacting to it. Also, sometimes they just use too many words.“

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